Connecting with God through poetic articulations of lived, embodied experience–engaging texts from the Revised Common Lectionary for Christian churches, other biblical and spiritual texts, and evocations of the divine in rituals and other public events–always accepting lived reality as a primary source of divine revelation and mystery.

Stop!

A Meditation on the Second Sunday of Advent, Year A

This strange John arises out of the wilderness sounding like a crazy man wandering the streets muttering and yelling incantations we do not understand, or if we do not wishing to hear as we bustle to and fro from work to home to shopping, maybe even a party where we gather to celebrate the Savior’s birth with too much food and drink. He is not Isaiah though he uses the prophet’s words to declare his mission: big things are coming and the Lord is on his way!

He is far from the first to proclaim big God news; Isaiah himself tells us a shoot shall come from the stump of Jesse and a new branch, a new David, will arise to change everything, all the predators will cease, their victims shall not only breathe easy but all will lie down in peace and plenty, a glorious vision for humans while undoing animal ways of survival—and it cannot be disconnected from Isaiah’s immediately prior verses where stumps are made by divinity angry at the ruining of life, the distortion of human relationships, by people who profess to love God. Cedars of Lebanon are cut down in response to perfidy by God’s people.

Strange John also points with alarm at the practitioners of unholy or at least mixed religious rule and greed for lofty stations based on public pieties of his day—we might include, as Isaiah does, those who trample on the economically distressed and disempowered from their high towers of privilege and gold-fixtured bathrooms— even as we pray for the souls of all, proclaim the coming reign of God. singing Come, O Come, Emmanuel, ransom captive Israel.

But who is captive? Israel then as now for sure, to fear of neighbors and desire to stride regionally, but closer to home are we not captive as well, enthralled by our own national virtue, sure of the rightness of our cause in the world as we bicker and stab each other at home, unwilling to provide health care for all, end violence on our streets and campuses by controlling guns and transforming dead-end lives on mean streets through shared commitment to the well-being of all, no matter color, nation, religion, gender and all the rest.

Stop!

Could not this Advent be a time not only to honor tradition—getting ready in the usual ways for Jesus, Mary, Joseph, shepherds, angels, and wise men— but also to break with tradition and turn the world upside down, letting our world be turned upside down, inside out, waiting in hope not for what we want or expect under the tree, or at the pageant, but being fully open to receiving what God wants in our lives?

About this poem. . . . The figure of John the Baptizer never quite seems to fit in well-ordered worship; it is often hard enough to domesticate Jesus (but by and large much Christian practice and worship has succeeded all too well), but John really stands out. This is especially so as the stores and the web are alive with shopping deals and catchy, familiar Christmas songs. But the message this Sunday is quite clear and stark: repent and let God have God’s way.